Will do, Carlo. I raised it in a comment thread with Ariel a couple of weeks ago, making the points that (a) earnings are messed up, meaning (b) only boosted articles have any chance of earning more than cents, so (c) people are really focused on who these nominators are, and what they are doing.

This means that Medium has to keep them on a very close leash, make sure they are doing everything with complete professionalism. It's always the danger with outsourcing anything - you're outsourcing your reputation if they screw up.

And having just a select few nominators means they really mustn't let the process down, through exclusivity or favouritism.

I think that has gone wrong, and while it could be corrected by extending the programme to more nominators to even things out, the suspicion among users must be that 'if it goes astray like this when it's just a really small, monitored, select sample, when they have 1000 nominators what's it going to look like?'.

I have a feeling we have another example here of nice idea in theory, meet brick wall of reality.